Jacqueline [email protected]
Every time you tap your phone to pay a bill, prove who you are or book a clinic appointment, a quiet question sits beneath the transaction: where does that information actually go?
For a growing number of governments, the answer matters as much as the service itself.
This is the heart of data sovereignty, and the idea of digital public infrastructure, or DPI, is giving it practical shape.
Think of DPI as the roads and bridges of the digital age.
Just as nobody expects every business to build its own motorway, nobody should need to build their own way of verifying identity or moving money.
Three pieces do most of the work: a national digital ID, a fast payment system and a trusted place to store data.
When they are designed well and speak to one another, they let banks, clinics, start-ups and ministries build on shared foundations rather than reinventing them.
Start with identity. A digital ID is only useful if it works everywhere, from the bank counter to the council office.
Estonia’s approach, built around a secure data-exchange layer that lets separate government systems talk to each other without hoarding everything in one place, is often held up as a model.
The lesson is interoperability: open standards, clear rules about who may ask for what, and citizens able to see who has looked at their records.
Without those safeguards, a single ID can become a single point of failure, or surveillance.
Payments tell a similar story. India’s UPI and Brazil’s Pix showed that when a central bank or public body runs a fast, low-cost rail that anyone can plug into, small traders benefit and competition grows.
Africa has its own proud history here, with mobile money transforming how millions save and send cash.
The next step is linking national systems so that a trader in Harare can, in time, be paid by a customer in Lusaka as easily as by one down the road.
Then comes the thornier matter of where the data lives. Many countries have discovered that their citizens’ records sit on servers abroad, governed by foreign laws and out of reach of local regulators.
Localised cloud frameworks aim to change that, requiring sensitive categories such as health, identity and financial data to be stored and processed within national borders, or at least under agreements that guarantee equivalent protection.
That is not about shutting the world out.
A sensible framework can still allow international providers to operate, provided they meet local standards and accept local jurisdiction.
There are real costs. Domestic data centres need reliable power, skilled engineers and long-term investment, and poorly drafted localisation rules can raise prices or push innovators elsewhere.
Strong laws mean little without independent regulators willing to enforce them, and trust, once lost through a breach or an overreaching official, is slow to rebuild.
Still, the direction is clear. Countries that treat digital infrastructure as a public good, built openly, governed transparently and anchored in national law, stand to gain both security and independence.
The question for policymakers is no longer whether to build these foundations, but whether they will build them in a way that serves the citizen first.
Jacqueline Ntaka is the CEO of Mviyo Technologies, a local technology company specialising in custom software development, mobile applications and data analytics solutions. She can be contacted at [email protected].
